The explosion is like a single drumbeat, coming from everywhere at once. Hiro can feel it coming up out of the water, shaking his feet. There's no big flame or cloud of smoke, but there is a sort of twin geyser effect that shoots out from underneath the Kodiak Queen, sending jets of white, steamy water upward like unfolding wings. The wings collapse in a sudden downpour, and then the Kodiak Queen seems shockingly low in the water. Low and getting lower.
All the men who are running down the pier suddenly stop in their tracks.
“Now,” Binocular Man mumbles into his lapel.
There are some smaller explosions down on the pier. The entire pier buckles and writhes like a snake in the water. One segment in particular, the segment with the bigwigs on it, is rocking and seesawing violently, smoke rising from both ends. It has been blown loose from the rest of the pier.
All of its occupants fall down in the same direction as it jerks sideways and begins to move, yanked out of its place. Hiro can see the tow cable rising up out of the water as it is stretched tight, running a couple of hundred feet to a small open boat with a big motor on it, which is now pulling out of the harbor.
There's still a dozen bodyguards on the segment. One of them sizes up the situation, aims his AK-47 across the water at the boat that's towing them, and loses his brains. There's a sniper on the top deck of the Kowloon.
All the other bodyguards throw their guns into the water.
“Time for Phase Five,” the man with the glass eye says. “A big fucking breakfast.”
By the time he and Hiro have sat back down in the dining room, the Kowloon has pulled away from the pier and is headed down the fjord, following a course parallel to the smaller boat that is towing the segment. As they eat, they can look out the window, across a few hundred yards of open water, and see the segment keeping pace with them. All the bigwigs and the bodyguards are on their asses now, keeping their centers of gravity low as the segment bucks nastily.
“When we get farther away from land, the waves get bigger,” the man with the glass eye says. “I hate that shit. All I want is to hang on to the breakfast long enough to tamp it down with some lunch.”
“Amen,” says Livio, heaping some scrambled eggs onto his plate.
“Are you going to pick those guys up?” Hiro says. “Or just let them stay out there for a while?”
“Fuck 'em. Let 'em freeze their asses off. Then when we bring them onto this boat, they'll be ready for it. Won't put up too much of a fight. Hey, maybe they'll even talk to us.”
Everyone seems pretty hungry. For a while, they just dig into breakfast. After a while, the man with the glass eye breaks the ice by announcing how great the food is, and everyone agrees. Hiro figures it's okay to talk now.
“I was wondering why you guys were interested in me.” Hiro figures that this is always a good thing to know in the case of the Mafia.
“We're all in the same happy gang,” the man with the glass eye says.
“Which gang is that?”
“Lagos's gang.”
“Huh?”
“Well, it's not really his gang. But he's the guy who put it together. The nucleus around which it formed.”
“How and why and what are you talking about?”
“Okay.” He shoves his plate away from him, folds up his napkin, puts it on the table. “Lagos had all these ideas. Ideas about all kinds of stuff.”
“So I noticed.”
“He had stacks all over the place, on all different topics. Stacks where he would pull together knowledge from all over the fucking map and tie it all together. He had these things stashed here and there around the Metaverse, waiting for the information to become useful.”
“More than one of them?” Hiro says.
“Supposedly. Well, a few years ago, Lagos approached L. Bob Rife.”
“He did?”
“Yeah. See, Rife has a million programmers working for him. He was paranoid that they were stealing his data.”
“I know that he was bugging their houses and so on.”
“The reason you know that is because you found it in Lagos's stack. And the reason Lagos bothered to look it up is because he was doing market research. Looking for someone who might pay him hard cash for the stuff he dug up in the Babel/Infocalypse stack.”
“He thought,” Hiro says, “that L. Bob Rife might have a use for some viruses.”
“Right. See, I don't understand all this shit. But I guess he found an old virus or something that was aimed at the elite thinkers.”
“The technological priesthood,” Hiro says. “The infocrats. It wiped out the whole infocracy of Sumer.”
“Whatever.”
“That's crazy,” Hiro says. “That's like if you find out your employees are stealing ballpoint pens, you take them out and kill them. He wouldn't be able to use it without destroying all his programmers' minds.”
“In its original form,” the man with the glass eye says. “But the whole point is, Lagos wanted to do research on it.”
“Informational warfare research.”
“Bingo. He wanted to isolate this thing and modify it so it could be used to control the programmers without blowing their brains sky high.”
“And did it work?”
“Who knows? Rife stole Lagos's idea. Just took it and ran with it. And after that, Lagos had no idea what Rife did with it. But a couple of years later, he started getting worried about a lot of stuff he was seeing.”
“Like the explosive growth in Reverend Wayne's Pearly Gates.”
“And these Russkies who speak in tongues. And the fact that Rife was digging up this old city—”
“Eridu.”
“Yeah. And the radio astronomy thing. Lagos had a lot of stuff he was worried about. So he began to approach people. He approached us. He approached that girl you used to go out with—”
“Juanita.”
“Yeah. Nice girl. And he approached Mr. Lee. So you might say that a few different people have been working on this little project.”
46
“Where'd they go?” Hiro says.
Everyone's already looking for the float, as though they all noticed at once that it was missing. Finally they see it, a quarter mile behind them, dead in the water. The bigwigs and the bodyguards are standing up now, all looking in the same direction. The speedboat is circling around to retrieve it.
“They must have figured out a way to detach the tow cable,” Hiro says.
“Not likely,” the man with the glass eye says. “It was attached to the bottom, under the water. And it's a steel cable, so there's no way they could cut it.”
Hiro sees another small craft bobbing on the water, about halfway between the Russians and the speedboat that was towing them. It's not obvious, because it's tiny, close to the water, done up in dull natural colors. It's a one-man kayak. Carrying a long-haired man.
“Shit,” Livio says. “Where the hell did he come from?”
The kayaker looks behind himself for a few moments, reading the waves, then suddenly turns back around and begins to paddle hard, accelerating, glancing back every few strokes. A big wave is coming, and just as it swells up underneath the kayak, he's matching its speed. The kayak stays on top of the wave and shoots forward like a missile, riding the swell, suddenly going twice as fast as anything else on the water.
Digging at the wave with one end of his paddle, the kayaker makes a few crude changes in his direction. Then he parks the paddle athwart the kayak, reaches down inside, and hauls out a small dark object, a tube about four feet long, which he hoists up to one shoulder.
He and the speedboat shoot past each other going in opposite directions, separated by a gap of only about twenty feet. Then the speedboat blows up.
The Kowloon has overshot the site of all this action by a few thousand yards. It's pulling around into as tight a turn as a vessel of this size can handle, trying to throw a one-eighty so it can go back and deal with the Russians and, somewhat more problematically, wit
h Raven.
Raven is paddling back toward his buddies.
“He's such an asshole,” Livio says. “What's he going to do, tow them out to the Raft behind his fucking kayak?”
“This gives me the creeps,” the man with the glass eye says. “Make sure we got some guys up there with Stingers. They must have a chopper coming or something.”
“No other ships on the radar,” says one of the other soldiers, coming in from the bridge. “Just us and them. And no choppers either.”
“You know Raven carries a nuke, right?” Hiro says.
“So I heard. But that kayak's not big enough. It's tiny. I can't believe you'd go out to sea in something like that.”
A mountain is growing out of the sea. A bubble of black water that keeps rising and broadening. Well behind the bobbing raft, a black tower has appeared, jutting vertically out of the water, a pair of wings sprouting from its top. The tower keeps getting taller, the wings getting higher out of the water, as before and aft, the mountain rises and shapes itself. Red stars and a few numbers. But no one has to read the numbers to know it's a submarine. A nuclear-missile submarine.
Then it stops. So close to the Russians on their little raft that Gurov and friends can practically jump onto it. Raven paddles toward them, cutting through the waves like a glass knife.
“Fuck me,” the man with the glass eye says. He is utterly astounded. “Fuck me, fuck me, fuck me. Uncle Enzo's gonna be pissed.”
“You couldn't of known,” Livio says. “Should we shoot at 'em?”
Before the man with the glass eye can make a policy decision, the deck gun on the top of the nukesub opens up. The first shell misses them by just a few yards.
“Okay, we got a rapidly evolving situation. Hiro, you come with me.”
The crew of the Kowloon has already sized up the situation and placed their bets on the nuclear submarine. They are running up and down the rails, dropping large fiberglass capsules into the water. The capsules break open to reveal bright orange folds, which blossom into life rafts.
Once the deck gunners on the nukesub figure out how to hit the Kowloon, the situation begins to evolve even more rapidly. The Kowloon can't decide whether to sink, burn, or simply disintegrate, so it does all three at once. By that time, most of the people who were on it have made their way onto a life raft. They all bob on the water, zip themselves into orange survival suits, and watch the nukesub.
Raven is the last person to go belowdecks on the submarine. He spends a minute or two removing some gear from his kayak: a few items in bags, and one eight-foot spear with a translucent, leaf-shaped head. Before he disappears into the hatch, he turns toward the wreckage of the Kowloon and holds the harpoon up over his head, a gesture of triumph and a promise all at once. Then he's gone. A couple of minutes later, the submarine is gone, too.
“That guy gives me the creeps,” the man with the glass eye says.
47
Once it starts coming clear to her, again, that these people are all twisted freaks, she starts to notice other things about them. For example, the whole time, no one ever looks her in the eye. Especially the men. No sex at all in these guys, they've got it pushed so far down inside of them. She can understand why they don't look at the fat babushkas. But she's a fifteen-year-old American chick, and she is used to getting the occasional look. Not here.
Until she looks up from her big vat of fish one day and finds that she is looking into some guy's chest. And when she follows his chest upward to his neck, and his neck all the way up to his face, she sees dark eyes staring right back at her, right over the top of the counter.
He's got something written on his forehead: POOR IMPULSE CONTROL. Which is kind of scary. Sexy, too. It gives him a certain measure of romance that none of these other people have. She was expecting the Raft to be dark and dangerous, and instead it's just like working where her mother works. This guy is the first person she's seen around this place who really looks like he belongs on the Raft.
And he's got the look down, too. Incredibly rank style. Although he has a long wispy mustache that doesn't do much for his face. Doesn't bring out his features well at all.
“Do you take the nasty stuff? One fish head or two?” she says, dangling the ladle picturesquely. She always talks trash to people because none of them can understand what she's saying.
“I'll take whatever you're offering,” the guy says. In English. Sort of a crisp accent.
“I'm not offering anything,” she says, “but if you want to stand there and browse, that's cool.”
He stands there and browses for a while. Long enough that people farther back in line stand up on tiptoe to see what the problem is. But when they see that the problem is this particular individual, they get down off their toes real fast, hunch down, sort of blend in to the mass of fishy-smelling wool.
“What's for dessert today?” the guy asks. “Got anything sweet for me?”
“We don't believe in dessert,” Y.T. says. “It's a fucking sin, remember?”
“Depends on your cultural orientation.”
“Oh, yeah? What culture are you oriented to?”
“I am an Aleut.”
“Oh, I've never heard of that.”
“That's because we've been fucked over,” the big scary Aleut says, “worse than any other people in history.”
“Sorry to hear that,” Y.T. says. “So, uh, do you want me to serve up some fish, or are you gonna stay hungry?”
The big Aleut stares at her for a while. Then he jerks his head sideways and says, “Come on. Let's get the fuck out of here.”
“What, and skip out on this cool job?”
He grins ridiculously. “I can find you a better job.”
“In this job, do I get to leave my clothes on?”
“Come on. We're going now,” he says, those eyes burning into her. She tries to ignore a sudden warm tense feeling down between her legs.
She starts following him down the cafeteria line, heading for a gap where she can exit into the dining area. The head babushka bitch comes stomping out from in back, hollers at her in some incomprehensible language.
Y.T. turns to look back. She feels a pair of big hands sliding up her sides, coming up into her armpits, and she pulls her arms to her sides, trying to stop it. But it's no good, the hands come all the way up and keep lifting, keep rising into the air, bringing her with them. The big guy hoists her right up over the counter like she's a three-year-old and sets her down next to him.
Y.T. turns back around to see the head babushka bitch, but she is frozen in a mixture of surprise, fear, and sexual outrage. But in the end, fear wins out, she averts her eyes, turns away, and goes to replace Y.T. at vat position number nine.
“Thanks for the lift,” Y.T. says, her voice wowing and fluttering ridiculously. “Uh, didn't you want to eat something?”
“I was thinking of going out anyway,” he says.
“Going out? Where do you go out on the Raft?”
“Come on, I'll show you.”
He leads her down passageways and up steep steel stairways and out onto the deck. It's getting close to twilight, the control tower of the Enterprise looms hard and black against a deep gray sky that's getting dark and gloomy so fast that it seems darker, now, than it will at midnight. But for now, none of the lights are on and that's all there is, black steel and slate sky.
She follows him down the deck of the ship to the stern. From here it's a thirty-foot drop to the water, they are looking out across the prosperous, clean white neighborhood of the Russian people, separated from the squalid dark tangle of the Raft per se by a wide canal patrolled by gun-toting blackrobes. There's no stairway or rope ladder here, but there is a thick rope hanging from the railing. The big Aleut guy hauls up a chunk of rope and drapes it under one arm and over one leg in a quick motion. Then he throws one arm around Y.T.'s waist, gathering her in the crook of his arm, leans back, and falls off the ship.
She absolutely refuses to scream. She feels
the rope stop his body, feels his arm squeeze her so tight she chokes for a moment, and then she's hanging there, hanging in the crook of his arm.
She's got her arms down to her side, defiant. But just for the hell of it, she leans into him, wraps her arms around his neck, puts her head on his shoulder, and hangs on tight. He rappels them down the rope, and soon they are standing on the sanitized, prosperous Russian version of the Raft.
“What's your name anyway?” she says.
“Dmitri Ravinoff,” he says. “Better known as Raven.”
Oh, shit.
The connections between boats are tangled and unpredictable. To get from point A to point B, you have to wander all over the place. But Raven knows where he's going. Occasionally, he reaches out, grabs her hand, but he doesn't yank her around even though she's going a lot slower than he is. Every so often, he looks back at her with a grin, like, I could hurt you, but I won't.
They come to a place where the Russian neighborhood is joined to the rest of the Raft by a wide plank bridge guarded by Uzi dudes. Raven ignores them, takes Y.T.'s hand again, and walks right across the bridge with her. Y.T. hardly has time to think through the implications of this before it hits her, she looks around, sees all these gaunt Asians, staring back at her like she's a five-course meal, and realizes: I'm on the Raft. Actually on the Raft.
“These are Hong Kong Vietnamese,” Raven says. “Started out in Vietnam, came to Hong Kong as boat people after the war there—so they've been living on sampans for a couple of generations now. Don't be scared, this isn't dangerous for you.”
“I don't think I can find my way back here,” Y.T. says.
“Relax,” he says. “I've never lost a girlfriend.”
“Have you ever had a girlfriend?”
Raven throws back his head and laughs. “A lot, in the old days. Not as many in the past few years.”
“Oh, yeah? The old days? Is that when you got your tattoo?”
“Yeah. I'm an alcoholic. Used to get in a lot of trouble. Been sober for eight years.”
“Then how come everyone's scared of you?”